A Guide for the Married Man (Gene Kelly, 1967)

Gene Kelly’s A Guide for the Married Man makes for mostly depressing viewing, if you regard the prospects for heterosexual marriage with even a scrap of romantic idealism. Paul Manning (Walter Matthau) is “happily” but aridly married and his thoughts drift to having an affair (perhaps with a neighbour; failing that just with anyone), egged on by his compulsively cheating neighbour Ed Stander (Robert Morse): the movie illustrates Ed’s advice on getting away with it with a series of sketches populated by “technical advisors” of the likes of Lucille Ball and Jack Benny. Some of the vignettes are moderately funny (although seldom very surprising), and at least the format provides an inherent degree of variety: Kelly’s direction is quite sprightly at times. But the society depicted here is a uniform existential wasteland in which a woman’s highest aspiration is to stay at home looking blandly beautiful and tending to her man and her children, all but extinguishing herself as a viable sexual being: for the husbands, it seems, the specific act of adultery is less significant than the prospective thrill of plotting to do it and the retrospective satisfaction of having gotten away with it (their lives being starved of any other compelling narratives). Everything is calculation and process, heavily aided by female gullibility and low expectations, enacted against a deadening materialistic backdrop: the ending in which Paul predictably “comes to his senses’ plays as fearful surrender more than happy awakening (Matthau in general seems rather depressed in the role, although that might be a form of commentary). It’s funny how many reviewers focus on the beauty of Inger Stevens in her role as Manning’s wife (“you have to wonder why Matthau would even consider adulterous behavior with a wife like Inger at home!”) as if this were a silly oversight of the film, rather than a proof of its toxicity.